Interviews

Street Fighter IV Interview with Yoshinori Ono

GameSpy: Yeah, no one liked to use my controllers after that. Let's talk about the four new characters in the game. What are you trying to bring to Street Fighter IV with these new challengers?

Yoshinori Ono: Let's start off by talking about Crimson Viper and El Fuerte. Crimson Viper is probably the most orthodox of the four characters. She has a projectile move, some anti-air moves, pretty traditional, pretty normal so to speak. The idea was to bring another new, another orthodox character to the roster whose style and design might appeal to American players.

There's a really cool thing about El Fuerte that makes him extremely unique. Street Fighter has always been a game about reading your opponent and guessing what they might do next and reacting to that. El Fuerte is crazy tricky. He moves really fast, he has a ton of options. He can start running toward you, and at that point he can decide to cancel out of that and stop running. He can attack you high or attack you low from that position. He's ridiculously hard to read, so he really mixes things up and brings new elements to the table.

We'll follow up here with Abel. He brings interesting things to the table in that he's a grappler, but he's not like other grapplers. We have Zangief and characters like that who have generally been really slow. Abel is much faster and more aggressive when it comes to reaching out and grabbing you, as opposed to having to be really close to grab you like Zangief. He's really interesting in that sense.

What's cool about Rufus is that he defies expectations based on what he looks like. He's a big guy, and a lot of other big guy characters in games move really slowly with powerful attacks. Rufus isn't like that. He's not terribly strong when it comes to individual punches and kicks, but he can string together some moves and do some really acrobatic stuff. He's extremely fast, so right out of the gate he's defying expectations, which makes him interesting.

What a Guy!

GameSpy: I was reminded of Guy from the Street Fighter Alpha series while playing with El Fuerte. Have you gotten that impression a lot?

Yoshinori Ono: That's definitely not your imagination. We actually thought about Guy when we were making this character. The thing with the Alpha series is that overall it's a very fast game. Much faster than Street Fighter II, right? So Guy had all these cool moves, but the game was so fast that it wasn't really easy to use him to his full potential. The idea behind El Fuerte, in a slower game, is to let you use moves similar to what Guy has in his toolbox, but allow you to use them strategically.

Now you can actually take your time to decide where you want to go with the move once you've started it. Your opponent can read what you're going to do at the slower pace. He's Guy-like, he's Guy-esque, but in this new context of this slightly slower game, he kind of opens up a lot of new doors and plays in a very different fashion from Guy. But we definitely thought of Guy while we were designing him.

It's important to note as well, we're not just talking about the El Fuerte-Guy connection. All the new characters have been deliberately designed in a way that they would feel like something that you've played before. We didn't want a character that was so completely different from anything you've used before that you wouldn't play with them, that they would be too hard to master. We didn't want someone saying, "this guy is too hard, I'm not going to use him, I'm just going to use this other guy whenever I play." We didn't want to make a game like that.

With all apologies to the hardcore users who would have been able to play with those guys, we really wanted to lower the barrier of entry. We wanted it so that when you first play, and check these characters out, you'd say, "wow, this feels like so-and-so," or "I've played a character similar to this." It was very deliberate on our part.